1. Field of the Invention
The invention relates in general to the field of waste disposal systems, and in particular to a system for sorting medical waste for disposal.
2. Description of the Related Art
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) enforces the Resource Conservation & Recovery Act (RCRA) which was enacted in 1976 in order to control the disposal of harmful or hazardous waste materials. There are currently over 100,000 drugs commercially available in the United States, of which about 14,000 are considered hazardous by RCRA requirements. A typical medium size hospital utilizes thousands of different drugs in a year of which hundreds are considered hazardous. The EPA is increasingly enforcing hospitals' compliance with the RCRA requirements because it has been shown in several studies that the 72 million pounds of pharmaceutical waste generated each year by hospitals is contributing to the pollution of groundwater and endocrine system damage in humans and other species. In addition, many organizations including Hospital for a Healthy Environment (H2E) and Joint Council for Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations (JCAHO) are pressing hospitals to be more environmentally friendly. In view of these changes, hospitals are increasing efforts to audit their own compliance with the laws. As a result, these hospitals are becoming more aware of the difficulty of sorting the numerous pharmaceutical waste streams that the EPA, Department of Transportation (DOT), Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), and some states require.
More than 3.2 million tons of medical waste is generated by hospitals, medical clinics and pharmaceutical manufacturers each year. Half of this waste is considered infectious. Most of the infectious waste was treated in over 2400 incinerators throughout the country, until 1998 when the EPA began to enforce tough environmental emission laws that have reduced the number of incinerators to just over a hundred nationwide. Now much of the infectious waste is hauled to these remaining incinerators, often a substantial distance, or is treated by alternative technologies such as autoclaves and chemical processors. There is very little choice for hospitals because of the upfront cost and large footprint of the processing equipment. Although many companies have offered different kinds of equipment, the prices vary from a few hundred thousand dollars for smaller units to a few million for large units. Because of the long cycling times to decontaminate the waste, the equipment typically is very large in order to provide acceptable throughput. There are also several companies that provide a service to hospitals by utilizing chemical processors mounted on trucks. They go to a facility and decontaminate the infectious waste, allowing the treated waste to be hauled to a local landfill. There are concerns that this technology may not completely treat the waste in all circumstances and the chemical residue left after processing may remain an ecological issue.
Increasingly, hospitals are required to comply with the recent and projected enforcement of federal and state hazardous pharmaceutical waste regulations. Currently, clinicians must manually sort pharmaceutical waste streams into different colored containers for proper disposal of the separate waste streams. It is often not clear to a clinician which pharmaceuticals or waste materials are hazardous simply by looking at the container. Such confusion may lead to clinicians throwing hazardous drugs in non-hazardous containers such as sharps containers, infectious waste bags, non-hazardous pharmaceutical containers or simply down the drain.